Back Issues: The Devastating Wall of Water

In a recent post on the Japanese tsunami and its aftereffects, Amy Davidson writes, “The ocean doesn’t sink cities; it shreds them.” She goes on to describe a video from the region, which “shows the water slouching into the streets, pushing aside and cracking cars and trucks, and then striking buildings and crushing them.” This description calls to mind a Comment by Akash Kapur, which ran shortly after the 2004 tsunami struck in South Asia. In his piece, Kapur describes the devastation caused by the “wall of water” which swept inland:

No one who survived the tsunami that crashed into South India on December 26th describes it as a wave. The fishermen and villagers who live along the coast, and whose homes and livelihoods were swept away, speak of a “wall of water.” The wall came without warning, rising suddenly to more than fifteen feet, and, along with cars and refrigerators and cattle and jewelry, claimed a death toll that defied comprehension as it escalated through the week. By Thursday night, more than ten thousand were dead in South India, and well over a hundred thousand across Asia, making it one of the most devastating natural disasters in history.
The wave came later. It was a wave of people, crawling inland with babies and baskets piled on their heads and shoulders, searching for higher ground.

Over the next few days, fears of more tsunamis subsided, and coastal residents, including children, returned to their villages. Kapur writes,

UNICEF estimated that children accounted for at least a third of the dead across Asia, and nearly all the students in the Kalapet school had lost a friend. But a teacher who had been summoned back to duty over the holidays marvelled at their cheerfulness. It was true: the schoolyard-turned-refugee camp was like a playground. Crowds gathered around a mobile water tank, chattering eagerly and tapping the pipes as government workers transferred the water to the school’s tanks. Girls and boys, freed from parental oversight, eyed each other nervously and giggled.

On a second-floor veranda overlooking the courtyard, some boys were chewing sugarcane and acting out roles from Tamil movies. One teen-ager climbed over the parapet and jumped to the ground, a drop of more than a dozen feet. “What are you doing?” the girls yelled. “You’ll break your legs.”

“People lost their lives—what do I care if I break my legs?” the boy shouted back, and he sauntered off, swinging his hips and singing a song from a movie.

Seven months after the 2004 tsunami hit, The New Yorker ran a Letter from Sri Lanka, by Philip Gourevitch, which explored some of the political ramifications of the natural disaster. In his piece, Gourevitch notes that the tsunami had, in a strange way, helped to temporarily halt the longstanding ethnic fighting there:

The contrast between the island’s natural attractions and its repellently violent history was thrown into stark relief by the tsunami, which killed half as many people in one blow as three decades of war and terror had claimed. Yet this devastation was perfectly arbitrary, and it is a measure of the depth of Sri Lanka’s troubles that for this reason the tsunami was widely regarded there not only as a disaster but also as an occasion for hope.

The President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, articulated this unlikely optimism when she addressed the nation two days after the tsunami. Sri Lanka, she declared, had been “incredibly humbled” by the waves, which had dealt death and destruction to all ethnic groups indiscriminately. Never mind that Sinhalese, who count for nearly seventy-five per cent of the island’s twenty million inhabitants, outnumber Tamils by roughly four to one, and that Tamils, in turn, outnumber the next largest minority group, Muslims, by three to one. “Nature does not differentiate in the treatment of peoples,” the President said, and she urged Sri Lankans to follow nature’s example. In fact, many had responded to the disaster by rushing to the aid of the afflicted without regard for their identity. There were stories of Sinhalese soldiers risking—and losing—their lives in efforts to rescue Tamil civilians; of Tamil businessmen carting meals to displaced Sinhalese survivors; and of Muslims buying up clothes and medicines to hand out to Hindus and Buddhists. It was only later that Sri Lankans had time to register their surprise at their own unthinking decency, and their relief at this discovery was compounded by a sense that the tsunami had saved the country from an imminent return to war.

_The entire article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.

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